Desperate to find a magic bullet to cure education's woes,
many are willing to embrace new curricula and unproven pedagogies, believing
that anything different must necessarily be good.

Educators may be pillars of the community, but their discourse is as
mercurial as Paris fashion. Desperate to find a magic bullet to cure
education's woes, many are willing to embrace new curricula and
unproven pedagogies, believing that anything different must necessarily
be good. Educators' current fascination with technology is a vivid
example.

Desperate to find a magic bullet to cure education's
woes, many are willing to embrace new curricula and unproven
pedagogies, believing that anything different must necessarily be
good.

There was a time, not long ago, when advocates of educational
technology gushed about the prospect of schoolchildren exchanging
e-mails with world-class experts on everything. The idea was exciting,
even if these world-class experts were hard-pressed to find time to
reply to e-mails from each other, let alone from tens of millions of
American schoolchildren. Eventually, that rosy vision receded into the
distance.

Today, proponents of technology deride traditional schools as
limited by a calendar determined by the requirements of agriculture and
a delivery system that mimics factories from the turn of the previous
century. From this critique, which rings true with most educators, they
leap to the conclusion that these limitations render traditional
schools wholly inadequate to prepare students for the information
age—as if the future no longer required graduates to read, think,
write, and solve problems using mathematics, at least not if they
developed these abilities using paper and pencil. This parallels the
insistence, by some "new economy" market analysts at the height of the
dot-com frenzy, that traditional bases for valuing companies were no
longer relevant.

As an alternative, technology advocates envision "anytime, anyplace"
learning customized to the needs of the individual learner. Grounded in
constructivist pedagogy, in which teachers are guides rather than the
primary purveyors of content, they see technology enabling a real-time
dynamic between assessment and curriculum. Assessment would not have to
wait for teachers to grade papers, and the next curricular step would
be determined individually, based on computer-graded assessment.
Reports, calibrated to state standards, would be available to parents
via the Internet on a 24-7 basis. While the experienced teacher's
eyebrows rise at the faith being invested in multiple-choice
assessment—arguably already too prominent in standardized tests
such as the Stanford Achievement Test, 9th Edition—this
educational equivalent of the automated battlefield appears a neat
little package to those who have never taught or who have forgotten how
they themselves became educated.

The exemplar of "anytime, anyplace" learning is online coursework to
enrich traditional schooling. In fact, the potential of online
education is intriguing, even if current technology and course design
are primitive. Imagine students in a remote town with a high school too
small to offer Advanced Placement courses in subjects that fascinate
them. For such students, or for students whose health renders them
housebound, online courses can do for education what the Sears
catalogue did for shopping: Place isolated learners on a level playing
field with their counterparts at elite urban and suburban schools.

These sensible uses, however, are not a large enough market to
sustain businesses that provide online education; therefore, a far
grander notion—of cyber schools as alternatives to traditional
schools—is being actively promoted by powerful, politically
connected entrepreneurs, including former U.S. Secretary of Education
William J. Bennett. Their goal, to access public funds to pay cyber
school tuition, dovetails nicely with the agendas of charter schools,
the voucher and home schooling movements, and school districts that
regard online schooling as providing less expensive alternatives to
building enough "brick and mortar" schools to accommodate population
growth.

Money aside, before society rushes headlong into cyber schools, we
must consider whether this is the education we want for children. In
2002, no serious educator can claim that online instruction is of the
same quality as competent face-to-face instruction. Cyber schooling is
rarely suggested for elementary and middle school students, as even its
most enthusiastic promoters would agree that young children need the
social experiences of a real classroom. Developmental concerns,
however, do not end with the 8th grade; indeed, development enters an
especially dangerous phase as adolescents are attracted to emotional
and behavioral extremes just as their potential to do harm reaches new
heights. Shakespeare had it right in Sonnet 18: "Rough winds do shake
the darling buds of May."

The purpose of high school education is not merely to implant
information and develop skills. The young people I teach are becoming
aware that there is a world beyond their neighborhood, and that they
are part of a rich and complex sequence of events that began long
before they were born and which will have implications far into the
future. This understanding is not easy to acquire, and breakthroughs in
understanding can engender confusion and even pain.

Before society rushes headlong into cyber schools, we
must consider whether this is the education we want for
children.

Education is a human enterprise, and while revelations certainly
occur while walking on the beach or sitting at a computer, the bulk of
academic understanding is best acquired in a classroom—in a
community of fellow learners. Students also learn essential life skills
in a classroom, including how to interpret meaning—not just in
words, but also in voices, eyes, and body language. Shy children emerge
from their shells, and aggressive children acquire gentleness and
polish. High school can be a dreadful milieu, but parrying insults and
ignoring stupidity are useful preparation for adulthood, while fleeing
traditional schools may only postpone problems and deny opportunities
to develop resilience.

Virtual community has value, but only for those who have learned to
be members of real communities. A cyber prom is no substitute for
social experiences that were formative in previous generations, and
cultural consequences are not factored into the business models of
cyber entrepreneurs. Real community has a normative effect on those who
tend to extremes: Those who veer too far from accepted norms must
moderate their views and behavior if they want others to associate with
them. Virtual communities do not encourage moderation in the same way.
The Columbine High School shooters found validation for their extreme
views in the virtual world. The anonymity of chat rooms and discussion
groups encourages extreme expression; for most, this constitutes
harmless venting or a tasteless exercise of free speech, but unstable
participants can be egged on, and sometimes go tragically over the
edge.

Education is a human enterprise, and while revelations
certainly occur while walking on the beach or sitting at a computer,
the bulk of academic understanding is best acquired in a
classroom—in a community of fellow learners.

As I teach, I determine the next step from the reactions of my
students. Did they understand what I just said? Why is there a question
in Clara's eyes, while John seems to have gotten it? In my experience,
John was more likely to have been confused by what I said, and Clara is
one of my most perceptive students. Is Clara's question directly
related to the material, or has the material activated emotions from
another part of her life? (I know that she's in therapy, though she
doesn't know that I know—and she didn't look her normal self when
she walked into the room.) Good teachers know their students very well
and adjust their teaching to achieve optimal results.

Good teachers also thrive on daily, face-to-face contact with
students, even if working conditions are far from ideal. In my
district, the average high school teacher has between 120 and 200
students. If I could earn comparable pay and benefits to teach 50
students online, and if wearing sweatpants to work were a high
priority, I might be tempted. Unfortunately, online education would be
prohibitively expensive if each teacher (paid at least $60,000 per
year, including benefits) taught only 50 students. If the online
teacher had to teach 120 to 200 students, the job would be nearly
unbearable—all of the work (more, actually) and a fraction of the
human contact, none of it face to face.

As a learning medium, online education is flawed. Designers of
online courses labor to create a simulacrum of community, but community
has more dimensions than software can emulate, so many participants
find they are not engaged and conclude that online learning is not for
them. As a substitute for face-to-face discussion, asynchronous threads
appear to be inherently less efficient. The primary way to participate
in an online class is to post messages. If a student logs on to a class
with 30 participants, a large number of messages are likely to have
been posted since he or she last logged on. If the fifth message
prompts agreement, the options are to either immediately post a
response or continue to read messages before coming back to that fifth
message. It is far easier to reply immediately. Unfortunately, by the
time the student has read the rest of the messages, there might be many
messages that echo the same sentiment but add little substance. This
duplication does not occur in face-to-face discussions, because
everyone in a room can readily assess—from nodding
heads—whether or not there is agreement.

Human beings were learning for many millennia before
computers and the Internet, and it would be shortsighted to abandon
this wealth of experience in favor of the unproven potential of
technology.

The rush to bring technology to education is motivated more by
commerce than evidence of educational value. Human beings were learning
for many millennia before computers and the Internet, and it would be
shortsighted to abandon this wealth of experience in favor of the
unproven potential of a combination of technologies that has been
available to schools for only about five years. The result will be a
colossally expensive failure if pilot programs and properly designed
research do not precede broad implementation.

If society is obligated to educate children, it must provide
sufficient schools and teachers. The schools need to be clean, safe
environments that welcome young people—not drive them to home
schooling or cyberspace. The teachers need to be caring adults able to
passionately convey both their subjects and the value of becoming an
educated person. Only after this commitment has begun to be
fulfilled—and technology and course design advance
significantly—will cyber schooling find its proper place in the
repertoire of educational options.

Alan Warhaftig is a national-board-certified high school English
teacher at the Fairfax Magnet Center for Visual Arts in Los Angeles. He
co-founded the Music for Educators program for the Los Angeles
Philharmonic and served as the coordinator of Learning in the Real
World, a nonprofit clearinghouse on technology in education and
childhood. His e-mail address is warhaftig@alumni.stanford.org.

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